JuliaNg specialises in the links between modern mathematics, political thought, and theories of history and language in the 20th century, particularly in the work of Walter Benjamin. She has published archival documents of Benjamin's and Scholem's meta-mathematical engagement with neo-Kantianism in a special issue she co-edited (with Rochelle Tobias) on Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem and the Marburg School, which appeared with Modern Language Notes in 2012. Her research is also concerned with the relation of philosophy to philology in regard to poetic modes of being, thinking, and acting since the 18th century. Other projects include a study of the mathematical infinite in modern German-Jewish thought, and a project on Daoism and capitalism based around Benjamin and Weber’s respective images of China ancient and modern.

Julia is Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought. She co-chairs the Walter Benjamin London Research Network, and serves on the editorial board of the series Walter Benjamin Studies for Bloomsbury Philosophy, and the scientific board of the forthcoming series Critical Theory for Inschibboleth edizioni. She is also Research Associate of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University.

Julia convenes the Modern Literary Theory MA Pathway.

Julia received her PhD in Comparative Literary Studies from Northwestern University in 2012, and a joint BA and MA in Comparative Literature from UCLA in 2002. Her doctoral thesis, on Benjamin's mathematical revision of the formal possibility of Kant's perpetual peace project, was awarded the 2013 Charles Bernheimer Prize by the American Comparative Literature Association. Prior to Goldsmiths she was a postdoctoral fellow of the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University.

Teaching

MA option module "Crisis and Critique"

MA core module "Theories of Literature and Culture"

BA PPE core module "Aesthetics"

Areas of supervision

Julia welcomes expressions of interest from students considering a PhD on topics across the fields of literary theory, Continental philosophy and critical theory, and German and comparative literature, particularly in regard to the reception of the late 18th century in early 20th century thought, politics and poetics, comparative aesthetics and political economy, and Walter Benjamin.

Research Interests

Julia is working on two book projects. The first, "Conditions of Impossibility," explores the link between the constitution of scientific objectivity and the expression and execution of political power in philosophy, literature and architecture since the seventeenth century. Taking cue from the self-consciously impossible character of Kant's projection of the just society, it argues that fictions and failures accompany and precede every determination of possibility imposed by the self-organization of embodied subjectivity, and ironically make possible alternative theories of political agency that do not rely on the presumption that human beings can build a world in which the protect themselves from every conceivable threat. The second project, "Body, Force, Right: Towards a Literary Theory of Posthumous Life," tracks a change between 1800 and 1900 in the conception of "life" that exceeds what is deemed "possible" for human subjectivity, uncovering a cosmic perspective on the meaning of the word "life"—that is, life at its bare minimum—in the "posthumous work" of Kant, Novalis, Nietzsche, and George.

In addition, Julia is developing a long-term collaborative project on "Mathematics, Philosophy, Literature," which seeks to bring together literary scholars, cultural and political theorists, philosophers, intellectual historians, and historians of science in discussion of the operations of the "mathematical" in concepts of history, objectivity, power, and signification.